culturas da minha terra*: COPAVI PROJECT: LETICIA

Meet Leticia! She is 17 years old, and she grew up and lives in COPAVI with her family. She loves living here, because it is a unique place, the community is a like a big extended family, and the friendships she has here are spectacular. She hopes to become a veterenarian, and help develop organic milk production in the settlement. She can't imaging living anywhere else. Leticia is proud of her community, when they arrived here in 1993, it was only sugarcane--now they have planted trees, implemented diverse production lines. She studies in the morning, and works in the afternoon in the community bakery.

Leticia was COPAVI's beauty queen a few years ago!

This video shows some of the photos and videos that she shot over the last week--of her family, friends, the garden, babies playing in dirt together (my favorite part!) The soundtrack is Teatro Mágico's cover of the classic MST song, Canção da Terra (Song of the Land). The music is an example of the MST's "cultural politics of dignification" (Gledhill 2009). Since I too like this catchy song, I've decided to translate the lyrics.

It happened on a certain day

"I can't imagine living anywhere else!"

The time of Ave Maria
The universe saw generate
In the beginning, the principle was made of fire
Didn't have an atlas, there was the globe
But the place had a name
It was earth...
And the creator of Nature
Made the fields and forests
Made the animals, made the sea
And did it for the rebellion...
That gives us the assurance
Which leads us to fight
For the Earth,
Mother Earth, our hope

View of grapevines in yard at home.

Where life gives its fruits
Your son has been singing
To be and have the whole dream
I am sem terra [landless], I am a warrior
With a mission to disseminate.
The Earth, Earth,
But, despite all this
The landlordism
That needs to end
Break the fences of ignorance
That produces intolerance
Land is for those who plant it.
The Earth, Earth,
Land....